Author Max Alexander

Presence

Max Alexander Leave a comment

“Happy ever after” doesn’t mean forever.

It just means time.

I feel like I keep dying.

And I don’t really know how to communicate that to anyone else. I had hoped it would stop happening, but it hasn’t. It’s only gotten worse.

I keep having this feeling, like I’ve somehow died; yet instead of the blackness of unconsciousness there’s just… this.

Once upon a time I went to Philadelphia to visit my friends. One of them flew in from Amsterdam, and we slept on the floor — two air mattresses laid next to each other; a coffee table moved out of the way. In the evening, before our hosts retired to their bedroom, we took turns playing YouTube videos, and we watched a movie about the arrival of a new perspective on time. As we inflated the mattresses, I argued back and forth with one of them about the film’s theme — about its compatibility with the non-existence of free will, and about its existentialist undertones — while a different friend got sheets out from her closet.

I feel like I keep dying.

And I felt this way before I even knew what was happening, or the why of it. Years and years; you can trace the feeling across my writing and my journal entries.

But now I’m older, and despite the fact I’m mostly not wiser, I do understand what’s been happening to my brain; at least a little. And it’s mostly not getting better. Though at this point it’s mostly not getting worse either, and so I’m mostly not sure what to do.

Once upon a time my Grandmother died. We held a funeral, and everyone cried, because she was dead. The day before, my aunts and uncles came from the other states where they live, and we all had dinner in a restaurant I’d never been to before, forty-five minutes away from where I live. My brother sat in the back of the car, and while I helped my Mom navigate Google maps, one of my friends told me I should buy a camera, and that we should amend our writing pact. While we ate, the AC vent above began to leak, maybe from the rainstorm twisting itself outside, across the evening dark, and so I shifted my chair a foot to the left. At the other end of the table, my cousin took off her sweater because the restaurant was too hot. Two days later, the day after the funeral, we all had bagels at a different cousin’s house. People shared stories from their childhood, and I learned a little bit more about all of them. The last time all of us had been in a room together must have been at least a decade ago, maybe more.

I have persistent feelings of unreality.

It’s interesting, actually, what the human brain is capable of experiencing. It’s like this pressure sets in, almost like being at the bottom of a pool.

Total silence.

A weight to everything — and yet my brain can’t see how anything actually exists. I feel something bearing down on me, and it smothers any conception of understanding I ever pretended to have, and despite this sudden lack of reality it feels like being crushed — enveloped in nothingness — an ever present reminder of what’s happening; everywhere I look; even if I try closing my eyes — I can still hear this metaphysical lacking thrum inside my head.

It’s claustrophobic.

Maybe death is just lacking — this certainly feels like a crushing sense of lack. And yet the world becomes so big and empty. There’s this tension between the weight of the silence, and the infinite expanse of the aloneness.

And I mean this as literally as I can. It really does feel that way. Like standing in an endlessly open field in the dead of night, while your ears are clogged from water pressure.

Once upon a time I went on vacation with my family to New Hampshire. When I was young we would always go up there, sometimes with my Grandmother. The last time my family was all together it was here — each of us renting a cabin around this crescent shaped lake; all except for one of my aunts, who lives twenty minutes down the road, on a street named after the dairy farm her husband owns. A decade or more later, in the evening, we turned the TV to a classic movie channel. I drank prosecco we had bought at the supermarket, and my dad lay — eyes half closed — on the couch, while the rest of us sat in chairs and watched some old film. It was in Spanish, and about an eight year old girl who believes her attempted assassination of her father, with baking soda as the poison, to be a success. After the movie I went outside and sat on the dock, by the edge of the lake. My mom came outside and we stared up at the stars, and the half lit cabins across the lake — all reflected in the dark water — while we failed to correctly identify any of the constellations.

Often when I’m like this I listen to music.

The sound doesn’t breathe any texture back into reality, but it helps distract from the silence. There’s an almost familiarity to the way the cords progress — the same pleasing pattern playing out exactly like whenever I first heard a song — even though I can’t actually feel the feeling of recognition anymore; only intellectually understand that I’ve been in this place before, or heard this song at least a hundred times.

I hate when I have to stop, and I’m forced to sit with the full silence of my situation.

Once upon a time most of my friends from High School came home for the summer; all except one, who decided to stay on campus. During the pandemic, the spring of my first year of college, the new friends I made there got me to join a game of Dungeons and Dragons. A few weeks later I started running sessions for my High School friends, despite the fact none of us had ever really played before. Then, later, when almost all of us were home for summer, and vaccinated, we unfolded a table in the center of a friend’s basement — and tried to set up a microphone so all of us could be heard by my other friend, who had chosen to stay on campus. Then we played a tabletop rpg, for one of the only times I’ve ever actually played it on a table top, and I threw a box of tissues at someone in a vain attempt to bring order back to the session.

It doesn’t feel like there’s anything to me, I suppose because I feel as if I’ve died. And I can’t see why anyone could ever care about me, because I’m not real. I’m dead; just a delusion that’s somehow still moving, despite its status as non-existent.

I just can’t see how anyone could love that. Or even just care about it at all; find any enjoyment in its presence. Want to spend time with it — with me.

But maybe no one else can see that endless pressure that’s always ready to descend on our reality. Maybe no one can see the real me, or the real universe, because none of it is real anyways. Maybe I’m the only one with the eyes to see the truth.

And that makes me think I’m an imposter.

Somehow I tricked everyone else into thinking I exist, despite the obvious fact of the matter — if only they had the sense to see it.

Once upon a time I went to Philadelphia to visit my friends. One of them is in a band, and on Sunday we got into a rental car, put a guitar and an amp in the trunk, and drove several hours into Pennsylvania. It began to rain, and our phones flashed with various warnings. The highway flooded in sections, and at one point we pulled over by the middle of the road — where the two directions of traffic are subdivided by a no man’s land — and waited for the rain to subdue itself, if only slightly. One of my friends brought a book, and while they read I stared out the window and played twenty questions. On the way home, another of my friends turned around from the front seat to ask if I’d had a good time — since we drove three or four hours in the rain, there and back, to reach the show — and I’m not sure they fully understood why the answer was an obvious yes, even though all we had done that day was sit in a car.

This feeling of dying — or being submerged — it’s almost like staring into the void. If you do it too long it takes something from you.

Sometimes it doesn’t feel like my life is my own, even after I reanimate — even after I’m resurrected. If you sever too many connections, even by accident, the whole thing falls apart.

Dead men don’t have any connection to their memories. They’re dead. They don’t have anything. Stare too long into the void — into the silence — and it takes all that from you.

Once upon a time I sat at my desk, in the basement of one of the only dormitories that had air-conditioning, and the two of us called over Google Meet. It was winter, but I kept the window by my bed open, and the brickwork of the wall was cold with January. She didn’t have internet, so she used a hotspot to connect her laptop to mine. On the floor by my bed was a large — wide but shallow — cardboard box, full of Lego pieces I had bought as an adult or saved from when I was a child. Together we watched a TV show, hundreds of miles apart, as she lay in her bed and I sat in a chair at my desk, and I cried a little — despite the fact it was only fiction. I don’t like the way this memory tastes to me now, and I’m not sure I want to try repairing my connection to it, but it’s still the case I felt a deep sense of affection that evening.

I want to say I don’t deserve love anymore, as punishment for the sin of tricking everyone into thinking I’m real, but the truth is I don’t deserve anything — because nothing’s real, and so no one is owed or has earned anything whatsoever.

Once upon a time someone drove me to Boston. We spoke about civilizational collapse and constitutional liberties for five hours, and the resiliency of various infrastructure grids. In the city I met someone from my book club — started a year prior, through near random chance — face to face for the first time. Two days later, right before my trip back, I met a different friend face to face for the first time as well. I navigated a suitcase over puddles, and protected my shoulders and my backpack with the umbrella I always keep in it, to meet them at a cafe. I had some french fries, and they had a sandwich, and we slid into conversation amongst the Sunday bustle of a downtown lunch crowd.

I don’t know why no one else can see the silence.

Once upon a time I took a train to the city. Everyone claims to love New York, or at least it seems that way, but I think the crowdedness shoves me out of my own sense of self. I met two friends there and we sat in a park and chatted. While our conversation readjusted me to myself, we spoke about the risks from artificial intelligence, and what kind of clothes we dressed in during high school, and they sipped coffee — all before we navigated our way across the city to buy bagels one of us had seen in a TikTok. In the evening I took the train home with that same person. They slept on the pull-out couch in my basement before then taking a different train to the country’s capital the following morning. Another day after, I then took a train there myself, sitting next to the second friend I had visited two days prior in the city, and I read a philosophy paper — occasionally checking my phone — as we moved across the East Coast. The following afternoon all of us met up again, alongside several others, and we toured the cherry blossoms and drank until the late evening began to shift to morning.

I think I’m overdramatizing my experiences, because I can’t help myself.

People certainly have it worse. People who experience this regularly; or lose entire chunks of their memory. Maybe hallucinate voices or experiences. I just kind of have to deal with this, sometimes — but outside feeling like a timelord, there’s not much impact on my life.

Drowning in non-existence sounds terrible, but I think it’s significantly preferable to actually drowning — which hundreds of thousands of people actually do, every year.

The only real impact on my life seems to be me writing very indulgent, or poorly structured, essays for my blog. That’s not a particularly heavy burden; it’s not much of a boulder — more of a Sisyphean skipping stone, if anything.

Once upon a time I sat by my window, let the cool wind of a rainstorm wash over my face, and the sounds of raindrops filled my ears. I tried to express the confusion my brain forces upon me, just because I’m me, and I tried to explain what it means to express love. I’m not sure what I’ve accomplished — mostly I just feel like a storybook character; a wrapping of descriptive traits around empty pages.

What does someone who experiences persistent unreality have to teach us about anything?

Maybe once I’d have said “quite a lot” — but I’m not sure that’s true anymore.

Then again, what do I know about anything? I just know that I feel as if I keep dying.

I think for me, deeply so, love is about presence. It’s not even about attention — though of course that is often an important aspect too — it’s simply the act of being near.

That’s how I express love — and that’s something I appreciate from others.

Because I feel like I keep dying. And it’s calming when I get a few moments with someone I care about — before I have to die again. And it’s meaningful to me that I’ve chosen to give my very limited time to the act of being close to someone else, even if we’re focused on two separate activities.

Love is a choice. Because I feel as if I keep dying, and I’m acutely aware of the fact that none of this is real — not really, anyways.

Because nothing’s really there. It’s just energy and position values — evolution somehow tricked us into thinking it was meaningful.

Without warning the world could become empty, and alone, and you could be crushed by the weight of nothingness. Your brain can just feel that way sometimes, for no real reason.

Maybe most people think this sounds insane, to which I say “you should try bartending”. Though apparently most people don’t uncontrollably dissociate if they serve drinks after eight p.m. — so again, what do I know?

None of this is real. There was never any point to any of this, and I am actually going to die one day. Not just this make believe version of passing on — I’ll really be gone one day, and so will everyone else too.

And I just want to be here with you. For these seconds we do have. To make it as real as I can, even if it never actually will be.

Nothing is real, and love is a choice.

I decided to be present for those moments I could. To be near people I care about.

I chose to take memories that don’t feel like mine and keep them close to my heart; hold them so tight they burn my hand. Let that heat bring me back to the world.

Nothing’s really real.

And still I won’t let go. I think that’s love, in the deepest sense. To ignore the silence that’s always threatening to crush us, and instead be here with each other. Even if we’re all just absentmindedly on our phones — not even saying anything as the evening takes hold of the living room, or our basement.

We choose to make all the meaning that exists, just by letting ourselves live, or by deciding not to die. Some say that’s the only actual question within philosophy — though others would say that’s really more of a myth.

Nothing is real, and nothing had to mean anything. So it’s especially special to me that I chose to let these people be meaningful — and I’m not sure how to communicate that to them, outside simply being present.

Because I could have chosen to be alone instead. It would have been easy, the water pressure is always there, in case I wanted it.

But I don’t want that. I just want time — here with you.

Once upon a time… someone asked me what the meaning of life is. There isn’t a real answer, not really; instead we get to choose one — if we want to. Because the world is chaotic. Just atoms, and the space between them. And every chance I get I like to say that, and maybe that’s because every chance it gets my brain forces me to feel the weight of that truth. Or maybe I just like using vaguely scientific terms to sound vaguely poetic — who knows. But nothing is really real, and there isn’t an answer to any of our grand meaning making questions. Yet, still, I have found my own — and I like to hold it against my chest, or cupped in my hands, and allow the warmth of it to evaporate some of the silence’s weight. For me, what is meaningful is connection — love and friendship — and for me the core of such experiences are based in-

Presence

Sometimes I get into a weird mood and it all feels this way, anyways.

Once Upon A Time

Max Alexander Leave a comment

Once Upon A Time

The world was terrible.

That’s something I didn’t appreciate for a long time, and I’m still not sure it’s something I really grasp. It’s one thing to see a statistic. It’s another thing entirely to sit and to try to imagine what those numbers are trying to say — what horror is tracked by the size of some zeros — and beyond this, it’s a wholly different thing to have lived through all that past sorrow and suffering.

Apparently, for hundreds, and thousands, and thousands, of years the child mortality rate was about 48% — on average. Some societies had it worse, and some had it slightly better, but mostly every other child was dying. 

I can’t imagine how sad that would have been. To watch helplessly as every second child was ripped from the world. I’m not a parent, and I’m not very old, but I’m older than billions of children will ever be. Because the past took them before their time, before they could even reach my not very advanced age. Twenty-two, almost twenty-three, years old. A brief cosmic flash. An almost nothing amount of life, and it’s a decade more than any of them got.

But that was once upon a time. 

Global morality is now at an average of 4.3%. Some countries have it much better, and some have it much worse. But everyone is doing better than before. The world is much better. A lot of stories get to have a happy ending now.

I wasn’t built to really grasp any of what I just said. I can’t appreciate how the world closed its eyes for but a second, and when they opened again my parents didn’t have to worry about losing me. I can’t see all the people saved by dividing one simple number by ten. But still, I can feel some of it — the weight of the words, the significance of the story — by taking a little time out of my day to really read between the lines. To sit and think about the pathway traced by a downward line on a graph.

༻❁༺

When I write something it feels, in some way, like carving a statue out of a block of marble. There are all these possible contours I could create, but as you remove a tiny bit of stone the potentiality of the work narrows. By choosing one word, one sentence, one order to place the paragraphs, you deny all the other possibilities that could have been. Eventually you’ve removed enough, and you’re left with the final shape — and then you press publish.

༻❁༺

Once upon a time, three billion years ago, the first steps of life emerged on a tiny rock caught in the gravity well of a slightly less tiny ten thousand degree sun. 

I often assume that things are as they were.

I suppose this is just the way the brain was set up to work. But it’s a trick of the light. It’s not the truth.

I lived through the advent of the smartphone, and an explosion of affordability for personal computing. Now there’s more RAM in my pocket than the giant Apple computer I played games on as a little kid. The world blinked and suddenly everyone was connected at every second of every day. 

And I just kind of assumed this is how things always had been. Empirically I knew it wasn’t true, but I never really thought about the transition I lived through, just because it happened slowly enough to make me believe nothing had really changed. 

Isn’t that strange? Shouldn’t that mean something more?

I can’t tell if I’m reading too much between the lines, but when you start really thinking about the world we find ourselves in, it’s hard not to think it’s a fantasy tale.

Because once upon a time it was just rock being smashed together by cosmic force. Then we took our first steps out of the sludge and onto the savannah — and then we brought child mortality down to 4.3%.

Once upon a time.

༻❁༺

A narrative is myopic. It’s the carving of shape from stone — focusing some features in a way that necessitates the absence of what might have been. I could tell you a tale about my day, and in that time you’ll never get back, you could have heard about somebody else’s. 

To grasp the truth of our world, the whole truth, would require moving beyond this. You’d need to see everything, all at once, across all time. I don’t know how to do that — so I have to read between the lines if I want to figure out where we’re all heading. I can’t just track the throughline of every atom until I found its conclusion. I can only see the carved out version of reality I make for myself.

༻❁༺

Once upon a time people hated some other people so much they tried to reorder the world just to keep someone like me from being born. Some numbers on a piece of paper can’t really capture just what that looks like. What that means.

We just assume that the shape of everything is the only one that could have been. Maybe that is true, because there’s no true randomness. But if that’s true then there was never any other way, and when I think about the billions of children who had to die I feel pain in a place I can’t quite describe. 

It shouldn’t have had to be like that.

But the point is that things aren’t as they always were. Once upon a time there was horror everywhere you turned in the world. And the world is still full of monsters, but there’s a lot more hope in it too. 

But it didn’t have to be this way. We could all have been born just a few decades earlier.

༻❁༺

There’s this distance I feel now, not always, but more often than a year ago, and I worry this makes me wrong somehow. I keep viewing the world with this fairytail breadth — like everything is just a collection of words on a page.

I’m seeing the world like that block of marble. Every day we carve a new groove into it — and the shape of the universe becomes fixed into a once upon a time. 

I’m worried that we’re carving something horrific into the stone. That our energy and our atoms will be eaten by a superintelligence, as it tries to grasp some truth we sent it searching for. Or that our happy ending was a blip — that tomorrow the world will close its eyes again, and when they reopen every second child has to die. 

Normally all of that seems implausible — because things will be as they always were, as is the way of the world. Tomorrow looks like today, and the sun always rises. 

But something strange gave my brain a mallet and a chisel, and now I can’t stop myself from seeing tomorrow as an unfinished stone statue. I’m getting closer to understanding what it’s like to see that pure, untouched, block of marble. We could carve almost anything into that — into the shape of the future — and that’s kind of horrifying.

Because once upon a time it was now. And that now was terrible. And then it got better, and we came into the present now. Tomorrow a new now will be shaped by the choices all of us make today — and I’m staring out my window with worry that tomorrow will bring what was once back upon us.

༻❁༺

Once upon a time two people fell in love. There’s decades of time captured in that one sentence. Once upon a time one of those lovers died a tragic death — from heartbreak or plague. That’s happened a billion times over. And all the nuance and all the scale of such a story is lost on me — on all of us.

My brain wasn’t meant for any of this. I’m moving too far away from everything.

But it’s with distance you appreciate the scale. And it’s with nearsightedness you learn what each tiny groove really means. The closeness I have to my family and friends lets me glimpse, with the distance of statistics and abstraction, the true horrors of the Holocaust or our historic rates of child mortality. 

༻❁༺

There’s something so alive about my life. So totalizing indescribable about it. How do you express the phenomenal aspect of simply being conscious?

I can’t see that deeply brilliant aspect in a statistic. It’s too dissociated from that feeling of aliveness. Only the person who lived it could feel it.

And so many people die every day. From the local level, from the eyes of the story, that’s unbearable. And somehow the fact that it’s happening so much makes it more okay. Watching the protagonist die is heart wrenching. Watching a planet explode is meaningless. 

༻❁༺

Once upon a time.

༻❁༺

There was a point to all of this, but I don’t know how to properly convey it — at the very least I don’t know how to tell if I’m succeeding. I need you to read between the lines, so you can really see it. 

༻❁༺

Once upon a time I sat at my desk, looking out at the rain, and I worried for the future. I can see where my words, here, and now, are going — but I can’t see where the rest of me is. Across all of history all those people who got to make it past 15 have worried about the same thing, in a sense. 

Some people think of these horrible futures as implausible. The world is stable — the now is stable, even the once upon a time is stable — it’s all fixed in place. Fixed in time.

And sure, the future is too — probably. But two centuries ago every second child died. Twenty years ago you couldn’t play the crossword and listen to music on the same pocket-sized screen.

The real world is a block of marble. If you actually knew what was to come, you could see exactly what that solid shape meant. 

Don’t you see how that stone really could take any form?

༻❁༺

What does it mean to be conscious? It’s to live in a story, of a sorts. More adaptable, more cohesive — more concrete and more comprehensive — but still, just some stories.

I built one around myself, just by opening my eyes every day.

Sometimes I run into another tale, and it conflicts with everything the narrative had revealed to me thus far. Of course it does. That narrative is myopic — because all stories have to be. They’re all just a piece of the marble block.

I don’t think any of us should assume we grasp the full nature of the world’s previous chapters, or even the current page, and especially the remaining words, just because we happened to be the main character of our own personal tiny tale.

༻❁༺

Once upon a time the world was terrible.

And I think it’s important to remember that.

A hundred billion humans lived across time — across all those onces. There’s something incomprehensible in that.

We should remember that too.

In the logic of a story things are finite and fixed. There is a pathway to the last page, but it can never be changed.

Once upon a time the last line was set in ink before you even began reading.

That’s probably true of our world too.

But we’re the authors of this story, even if we’re characters in it too.

We should try to make sure it’s a good one.

Make sure it isn’t reaching its conclusion. At least not too soon, or too abruptly. We should make sure it doesn’t repeat any of those incomprehensibly horrible past plot points.

Because for now, that ever-present and ever-brief time, we’re the ones with the pen and paper.

We’re the ones carving away tiny shapes into the stone.

The ones dividing a simple number by ten.

Once Upon A Time

Beneath all things

Max Alexander Leave a comment

“It is so easy to paper over monstrosity.”

Charles Xavier

There’s something horrific about the idea of hell. 

Which is, of course, the point of it all. It’s not a particularly scary story without some horror to go alongside it.

But I think there’s something far, far, more unsettling than hell itself. 

Our response.

Beneath all things

It’s not particularly new as an idea, but forgiveness goes hand in hand with nobleness. And if forgiveness is one of our highest ideals, how could we accept the concept of eternal damnation? How could we pray for others to be cast down into it?

But we do wish for it — at least for others, at least some of us do. 

And isn’t that the true horror?

Hell isn’t a good place to be. Again, that’s the whole point. I can’t imagine the sort of person who wishes fire and torture onto another. At least I can’t imagine wishing it if you really stopped to think about what it meant. I’ve been cut, along my skin and inside my soul, but I’ve never known real suffering. Some people have, and then some people wished that pain upon others, a thousand fold greater — a thousand fold over.

Don’t you find that unsettling? Deeply so? 

It’s not a particularly new idea, but if hell really, truly, did exist, there would be only one reasonable response. To make sure it was empty.

And this is why I don’t think I could seriously believe in some form of christianity. Though, I’m no religious scholar; and the real reason is actually rooted in epistemics and upbringing. But still — how can god be all good, and all powerful, and allow for a hell to exist? It must be that god is not all good, in which case I feel no obligation to listen. Or, god must not be all powerful, in which case what’s it going to do, send me to hell? 

Round and round we go.

But we’re circling the real issue here. It wasn’t gods that devised hell — it was us. And then we pretended it wasn’t the most horrific thing we could think up.

We keep inventing ideas that are too big for our own skulls. And then we lack the wherewithal to withstand their implication. We don’t really look at what we’ve created. We ignore it, and move on.

 So we write stories where people get sent to hell. We casually condemn people to it, in the comfort of our own home or within the anonymity of mass — virtual or otherwise.

And I think there’s something deeply upsetting about that. In a way my mind can’t really understand, because it’s one of those discomforts that’s just too big for our brains.

But anytime I read a book or watch a movie, especially given the popularity of fantasy now, I find it unsettling when a character knows about hell and carries about their day all the same, or even sends someone there. I find it horrifying. How could a character like that ever be a hero?

I guess I don’t think they can. Not really. And the fact authors and audiences don’t seem to agree unsettles me even more. 

I have a way with words, and I live in a world of stories. And hell is just that — a story we made up. And then we turned away from the truth that fiction reflected back upon us.

Is that okay, just because it’s intuitive? Is that okay, just because it’s typical? 

I have a way with words, and I live in a world of stories, and I have power beyond the means of most humans to ever live.

Do you think there are things I’ve written that I’ve then turned away from? Do you think I too am complicit in ignoring some horrific truth? 

I have a way with words, but mostly I’ve been finding I lack the groundedness to make them work for me. Mostly, I think, I’ve been using them with too much distance; I’ve been too aloof. 

But the devil’s in the details, and all too often we ignore those. We ignore scale, and ignoring even that, we precociously move past what those details really hold. 

And I wish I knew how to stop all these people, fictitious or otherwise, from doing that.

I wish I could stop doing it myself.

Imagine if someone cast someone you loved into that. Into hell.

How horrific.

So I can’t take seriously anyone who seriously could accept such a thing. Accept hell. And every time I read a story where the characters turn away from that, or whenever I see other people — real live people — doing the same thing, a little piece of me burns away too.

What does it mean to make hell on earth? 

I think we’ve probably done that a few times. We might even be doing it right now. 

We made the story real.

And there’s no god to stop us, because that’s one of the stories that isn’t.

So it falls on us to fix our mistake. It falls on us to make sure it’s empty. To erase the possibility of that horror.

And I worry none of us, or at least far too few, are really capable of seeing just what we’ve unleashed on the world. Of seeing just how deeply troubling all that would be, and maybe is. 

I worry we all keep turning away from the real meaning of what we’ve written onto the world. Just like all those authors and all those fantasy heroes, and all those priests — and I don’t want to be one of those. 

So I hope when I come face to face with horror, even when it’s abstract and fantastical fires, I still fight back against such things.

I hope all of us will.

Tomorrow Never Comes.

Max Alexander Leave a comment

For the past three years, every new year, I have one particularly rough night wherein I reflect deeply on the fact I am going to die.

And not just die, but irreparably warp into a new person. Every day. Every minute. And I can’t stop myself from melting into someone new — no matter how much I might want to.

It took longer this year, but all roads lead to this one night.

And that’s tonight. For me at least.

Tomorrow.

It’s hard to know what to say.

Talking about things helps me think them through and it helps me feel better.

But I just want to write what I did a year ago, or more like thirteen months, when I was slumped against the brick wall of my dorm room  — crying. 

I don’t know how to communicate to the people I love just how deeply this affection goes. One day they won’t be here anymore and all I’ll have are fragments of memory.

Well, it’s been over a year, and now my grandmother and my dog are gone.

I don’t know how I’m going to be able to live when I wake up one day and it’s my mom or my dad as well. 

There’s such an overwhelming sadness to that feeling that I simply cannot communicate.

I wish I knew how.

Not that it would change anything, but maybe I’d at least feel like I could show people what it’s like to be me — at least me right now. Express why I care, or how deep it goes.

I know everyone feels like this, sometimes, but I don’t think most people feel it the way I do.

Never.

So, as it turns out, I have some sort of disposition to dissociate.

With the benefit of hindsight, this explains some things.

It’s also remarkably stupid that it took me so long to learn that my brain was randomly causing this to happen. But, thankfully, I spent a lot of time last year dissociated. Eventually I put the pieces together and figured out why going to museums as a kid had such a distinctly weird feeling.

And, to be clear, it’s not always bad to dissociate, I think.

There’s a kind of magic to getting lost in another world. But you don’t want the world you’re getting lost in to be your bedroom, or your own mind.

Comes.

We could psychoanalyze me.

Why do I fret so much about change? About losing people?

Because I feel cosmically alone when I’m like this. Because I intently understand the transience of this moment and my own personality.

Because I feel like an outsider. An observer. Not really here anymore. Not really real.

And sure, none of that stuff helps. But I don’t think it’s the main reason.

Dissociation is like your mind and your body shutting down — except nothing actually is.

Physical sensation stops getting passed through and subsections of the brain stop reporting information to your consciousness. 

The result is that I’ll take my coat off in the middle of a winter night, because I can’t feel the cold, and that mundane objects become fantastical, because the concept association part of my brain no longer respects the conscious part of me.

But everything still works the same, even if you can’t feel it. I still move and respond the same, even if I can’t understand it.

So I need to be careful not to give myself a cold, even though I can’t feel any right now. 

Tomorrow.

I think there’s something wrong with me.

I mean actually we’ve identified one of the problems — the issue is solving it.

And it’s not like this is impacting my ability to live life. It’s not like I fail to show up to class or eat dinner because I’m too dissociated.

It’s not like I perform worse on tasks, at least none of the ones I’ve been doing, when I’m like this.

I don’t even think it’s noticeable, unless I told you. 

This makes things weird — though in fairness that is always how things are with me. Even when I’m in normal states I think my head is a chaotic place. It’s just strange to be me, no matter what’s going on.

But it does make things weird to watch your body move on its own, and know you’re just a passenger to your own life.

It’s weird to see yourself respond as you always have, to watch yourself move as you normally do, and to have your consciousness drowned in murk as it happens. 

To view reality through a window. Outside space and time.

It’s weird to understand that no one has any actual control. That we’re just physical systems responding to stimuli, all in perfectly predictable ways. 

It is weird to go outside and not feel the cold. To not understand why the street you live on doesn’t look familiar anymore.

It’s all just very strange. Even now.

Never.

There’s a silence that comes with these experiences. An aloneness.

I’m not connected to anything or anyone — not even myself.

But in the stillness and the silence, and the absence of concepts or mental clutter, there is just one thing. 

It’s not always the same thing, of course.

It’s like getting to view a tree or a street lamp for the first time. To see only that thing. To feel fully the concept that goes alongside that cluster of molecules.

And so the world becomes overwhelmingly beautiful. 

I’m not sure if everyone else can see things like this, and the fact I do seems to cause me a not-insignificant amount of strife — but I do wish I could show other people the way I see things, at least some times.

Comes.

There’s the world above ours. One of silence and meaninglessness — not because of any profound or existential nihilism, not because of some grand point about the universe.

It’s just that the world is silent and still, because motion and motivation only make sense with regards to a referent; There’s no true point of reference for reality, and the total amount of matter and energy is remaining unchanged. It’s still.

So I’m not trying to make a grand existential point.

I just wish other people could sometimes understand what the world looks like. At least what it looks like when you peel back some of the layers. What it looks like to me, right now, today.

And then I wish I could show you how beautiful everything is.

And that makes me want to cry.

Tomorrow.

I just broke down crying as I was walking home.

I don’t usually break down crying — except for unexpected break-ups, which somehow has also been all of them.

But here I am.

And I want to say I don’t know why.

But that wouldn’t be true. I’m crying because we’re all going to die, and one day none of us will see each other again — and that’s just too much for me right now.

Never.

I feel things intensely.

Sometimes I wonder if this is weakness, but passion and excitement aren’t bad things.

Things just feel intense to me, whatever they are.

And right now I’m in a state where my brain will only provide me with a few pieces of sensation or a few concepts to work with. Everything else gets filtered out, relegated to the background.

So I am intensely feeling the fact that I care about things. About the people in my life.

And these feelings are outstripping my ability to act, to communicate.

I’m only here for a moment, and then someone else takes my place.

I’m stuck with all the memories of the people whose lives I’ve taken over. 

Soon someone else will have my memories.

The memory of this moment.

And in this moment I’m barely even here. Everything is staggered and still, and the distinction between instances of time has become jagged, instead of the smooth transition our brains typically bless us with.

So deeply I understand that each moment of our lives is fleeting. 

And I don’t know how to communicate that to you in a way that you can understand. I’m not that good a writer.

So deeply I feel overwhelmed by the truth in front of me, and I don’t know how to tell anyone else that.

Comes.

I’m overwhelmed by the fact I got to live this life.

These moments were valuable. They were beautiful and I want them to be mine forever.

I think I have lived an almost entirely unremarkable life. But it was my life. I loved these seconds I got and the people who shared it with me.

Overwhelmingly so, the times I got to sit on the couch with my family or chat over the phone with friends were delightful to me. I don’t yearn for some grand adventure or some luxurious party — I just want to live alongside the people I care about.

I don’t know how to communicate that the day to day of my life is what I want most. I don’t know what more I could want, or need, than a bit more time with those who are important to me.

I just want another tomorrow with you all.

Tomorrow.

One year ago, or more like thirteen months, I was in a basement dorm room, under my covers, crying, as the cold of the outside seeped its way into me through the brickwork of my wall. 

I blinked and I woke up today. Here in the future.

It’s so strange to fully and completely understand what was happening to me in that moment.

I didn’t think I ever would again, I think.

But I thought wrong — this is exactly the way I felt a year ago. I haven’t felt that way since, but I feel it right now.

The texture is identical, and I wish, again, I knew how to communicate that. 

But I don’t.

Never.

I don’t know what I am anymore.

I thought this might stop happening to me, but it hasn’t.

I thought I might feel okay again one day, but I don’t.

Because I’m just me. This one single second. And then I’m someone else.

I don’t know how to handle the fact properly. Because day to day, most days, I’m mostly fine. Even though the last year has been more stressful than normal, and even though I don’t yet have a real job, I’m mostly fine most of the time.

Actually I’m probably vaguely happy most of the time, at least. Most of the time I get to use the internet or talk with people, so it’s hard not to be at least a little happy.

But I’m not talking with other people right now. I’m not watching a YouTube video.

I’m here.

Tomorrow I’ll do those things, but it’s not tomorrow.

And it won’t be me.

So intensely do I feel the finality of my existence, and the inescapable fact that because something like me exists, sometimes, someone is going to have to feel what I’m feeling right now.

By being alive, the system that is me condemns one person, once a year, to this.

Tomorrow someone is going to fix the spelling of sentences I typed on my phone, and tomorrow someone will copy these sentences onto my blog.

But I won’t be here tomorrow. 

No number of exclamation marks can convey that fact properly.

I won’t be here tomorrow. Someone else will. 

Comes.

I just want to see the people I love. I just want to be okay.

Tomorrow.

The problem, I’m realizing, after three delightful years of this tradition, is that I am mostly okay.

I have a home and people who care about me. I was lucky, and so I’m smart and charming. I have food and I have more wealth than almost every human who has ever lived.

Most of the time I’m on Twitter, or watching a movie with my parents, or chatting with friends. 

The issue is that someone else is doing those things, and not me.

If 99.99% of the time I am perfectly fine, it doesn’t change the sheer overwhelmingness of being like this right now.

It’s so strange and I don’t have the words left tonight to explain just why every thing conspires against a feeling of normalcy when I’m like this.

And that sucks — for me at least.

Because tomorrow someone else will be okay. But I won’t get to see that tomorrow.

Never.

I think I take a little pride in the way my mind works.

It’s confusing and there’s all these tangents, but usually it all relates back to itself in the end.

Sometimes I’ll talk for five minutes straight, and then my friend will point out that I’ve done this. And that somehow, miraculously, it did all make mostly sense in the end.

I don’t know if I pulled that off tonight.

Tonight I just want to pull a blanket over myself and cry. I don’t know how to live life properly, and I keep living my life in spite of this. My brain fundamentally refuses to work normally and yet I keep going about a very normal existence.

I can’t accept that things will change and that I’ll die.

I can’t accept that some things are lost to me forever. I can’t accept that my grandmother is dead. That there’s a different dog sleeping in our gray chair.

I can’t accept that tomorrow isn’t coming for me tomorrow.

I refuse.

And that refusal won’t stop anything. I’m going to fall asleep eventually.

But still I do.

Comes.

It’s hard to communicate the futility of using language, which is of course a byproduct of the problem I’m failing to explain.

I realize that when you read what I’ve written it won’t really make sense — or it won’t make the sense I want it to.

I can say that I care deeply, but that sentence isn’t expressing properly what I feel like to care so deeply you burst into tears.

Sometimes inside my head I’m exploding, and sometimes my brain is staggering conscious experience and preventing me from feeling the cold, or recognizing familiar shapes, and on the outside it looks the same either way. Whether or not I understand what my reflection really looks like has no bearing on whether or not you recognize me.

And what I feel has no impact on what these words mean to you.

And so I just can’t capture what I’m feeling tonight, even though I’m really trying.

Tomorrow.

I don’t know how everyone else can function when this is the world we live in; though I suppose I’m still functioning.

The way light dances, actually dances — spins in circles across a doorframe or reflects off the moon — or the way vines crawl alongside the paneling of a house — reaching up for the stars, just like humanity has. The way vapor and atmospheric pressure form a crucible, that chaos theory then forges once in a lifetime celestial shapes with.

One day I woke up and found that everything was still, and that everything vibrated with hidden beauty. Every day I go outside and I am washed away by that absurd beauty everyone else is nonchalantly walking past.

Never.

I don’t know how everyone else can make it through their day without breaking down, without crying; though I suppose most days I don’t either. 

One day I’ll have to say goodbye to everything I’ve ever loved. Or someone will have to say goodbye to me.

Think about that fact. Actually think about it, because I don’t have the words to properly capture what actually reflecting on this should feel like to you. But it’s a horrific truth. 

“How do you live with that?” ask the man who continues to live, whether or not he actually can stomach that truth.

I can’t bear to say goodbye. Not to this world. Not to the beauty before us. And not to the people I care about. 

Maybe the real question is how I only have a breakdown over this once a year.

Comes.

What’s the real cause of this then? Why do I feel like this sometimes?

I dismissed the easy answer, so there must be another. 

If the cause isn’t this sense of cosmic aloneness, if the cause isn’t how empty the world looks right now — how still it all is — what is the main thing causing all of this? Because it’s a pretty intense thing to be experiencing, whatever the reason for it is. 

I think it’s love. I think that’s the explanation. 

Being like this makes everything more intense — or more aptly the few things I am left with more intense, which is saying a lot given my baseline levels of intensity. And right now those things I’m experiencing are affection for the important people in my life and recollection of the moments we shared.

Right now my brain is placing no limit on how deeply it will let me feel that affection. 

And why should it?

I don’t think the issue here is that I’m feeling like this. I think the issue is that I’m not at home, I’m not with those people. It’s late at night and everyone is asleep. Friends on different continents are disconnected from my life and the people who are dead now are forever trapped in the past.

And that’s just sad.

And so I’m crying.

It’s not some maladaptive existential loneliness that makes me like this. It’s just me experiencing the appropriate affection, the appropriate reaction, to the cosmic circumstances I find myself in. It’s just me properly reacting to the fact everyone will be dead one day.

And it is in fact made worse by being dissociated. Because even though I know tomorrow someone like me will see these people, and even though I know I will continue to spectacularly fail to communicate my affection, I am also deeply aware of the fact that for me 

Tomorrow Never Comes.

Slice of life

Max Alexander Leave a comment

“He has a lot going on in his head”

 -my friend’s mom after reading my first blog post.

This is the only thing I’ve ever heard from her.

I think that every so often it’s good practice to sit down and take stock of your life. Check in with how you’re doing, like checking in on an old friend.

Actually that’s just a good hook for a blog post. I almost never think about doing that. I don’t have anything like a calendar reminder set for every 3 months to make sure I’m hitting my goals — I can barely do that on the order of 3 hours. 

But I already wrote the hook, and only a coward would edit their writing. So in the words of the ever wise Mario, “here we go.” 

Slice of life

I would say, honestly, my last few months have been unremarkable. I’ve been job hunting, and sometimes I’ll open Hinge, but otherwise I’m just doing normal person things. I probably spend too much time on Twitter, but that’s also a normal person thing.

I think there’s something strange then about the fact that I feel as if I have completely lost my mind, and that it’s been lost for nearly a year at this point.

Well more like 9 months ago, but who’s counting? 

And the irony and thematic significance of such a fact is not lost on me. There’s some sort of deep absurdist tension between living the most stereotypical life imaginable and also having the most strange conscious experiences in spite of that fact.

I got a degree in philosophy, and the only math I studied was the stuff you can’t monetize, and now I’m living at home with my parents. Everyone joked that getting a degree in philosophy would mean I’d end up unemployed, even though philosophy undergrads statistically have higher earning potential, and here I am — working in a bar.

So yes, this is what I expected. 

Well not the working in a bar part, but something like that. Not earning a lot of money and doing a part-time job I often find impressively boring. 

That’s a pretty mundane outcome. And basically how lots of people who graduate college spend the first 6 months.

And yet, totally unrelatedly, I feel as if I keep losing my mind. I stared into the void and now I don’t know how to be normal anymore — and I wasn’t particularly normal to start with. 

There is an almost ever present chaos surrounding my mind, even as I go about my very normal life and take very normal and mundane daily actions. 

I feel this tension a lot in my life. 

For example, I took an evaluation to put a numerical number on how dissociated I am day to day; to measure with science how ungrounded my brain is, and the results are just — mundane?

Like I am in fact scoring ~2x the average, but it’s well below a psychologically concerning amount.

I mean I gave a range of values for many questions to account for uncertainty, so my score is actually between 1-3x the average… which is still fine. 

And I noticed when answering the questions I score really high on all the measures that aren’t that concerning to score high on, and don’t experience any of the stuff that really messes with your life.

I don’t have false memories and I don’t have blank spots in my life. I don’t show up to a place and have no idea how I got there, or why or where I am.

I just feel weird a lot.

Feel detached.

And I feel like I’m losing my mind; and have lost it over and over again. But based on these evaluations I actually haven’t. And based on my ability to live life I haven’t either. I score low on depression tests and while it turns out I almost certainly have ADHD, I mostly got that one sorted out (thank you pharmaceutical industry).

So what the fuck. 

I’m just really weird, it seems.

But again, staggeringly mundane. Like I spend most of my time procrastinating on work, reading comics — scrolling through Twitter or closing and reopening reddit. I am, on paper, living an extremely stereotypical 22 year old life.

And as far as I’ve been able to tell there’s nothing diagnosisably wrong with me (outside the ADHD).

Which of course makes sense, because typically to get diagnosed with something it has to impact your ability to live life, and I’m living a stereotypical life from inside my parents’ house. 

So again, what the fuck is going on?

Like I cannot go outside without causing myself to dissociate. I’ll go on walks and faceplant into platonic forms or abstract objects. It’s emotionally overwhelming how beautiful the world is, and I keep obsessively trying and failing to take pictures of every pretty cloud I see — which is all of them?

I have such a strong introspective catalog of my phenomenological experience, which is aptly named since being me is incredible, that taking Adderall, doing a shot, or just sleeping too few hours will make me feel like a completely different entity.

I fundamentally don’t understand what it’s like to feel grounded, like I just don’t have an associated concept for that phrase. 

I am constantly getting lost in my imagination, which switches on instantaneously, often without me intending to use it.

I don’t feel like a real person, probably on account of the 2x the recommended daily dosage of dissociation. And this also means streets I’ve been on a thousand times will feel completely new and unfamiliar, despite my storied history with them. 

And to top it all off I am becoming fundamentally doubtful of my ability to meaningfully or properly connect with other people, despite the ever present evidence from my myriad friendships that actually I’m quite likable. Of course in fairness one can be charismatic and also an atemporal entity that can never be properly grasped; though this seems unlikely to be relevant to my life, despite the ever present feeling of it being true.

And also there are apparently no nerds on hinge, cause fuck me (non-literally, which is the annoying part here), so it doesn’t even matter that I’m a cosmic horror from a universe beyond — my dating life is largely unaffected. 

*Sigh*

I’m trying to write something approachable. Something normal and relatable.

A slice of life.

Of my life. 

But I don’t know how to. Or more accurately, to take a slice of my life right now is to get a mouthful of ever present ungrounded unreality.

I don’t feel like a real person. I feel abstract and ineffable.

And some of this is the fact I wrote this post mostly in the evening, because I have a publishing deadline and I’m behind, but I don’t think that’s the real cause. 

I don’t know what the real cause is. Maybe it’s a byproduct of ADHD, which has been suggested to me.

Maybe I was just so sad and so naturally introspective last spring that I dug too deep and woke up a metaphysical balrog.

 I went on lots of late night walks in an attempt to cure my heart break, and all that really managed to do was make me feel an overwhelming sense of beauty and an ever crushing weight of loneliness.

And now whenever I go outside past sundown my brain explodes and takes constant psychic damage from how pretty and how confusing streetlights and shadows look.

Again, what the fuck. 

Like I want to describe what the past few months have been like, because that’s the prompt for this blog post, and I don’t know how to do that in a way that doesn’t sound sickeningly poetic and self-aggrandizing.

When I go outside my consciousness melts away, and it feels like I hold pure emotion between my fingers or gaze upon the rawest form of the universe.

I find that I lose myself in a picture or a movie, and it barely takes half a minute for the riptide of fiction or imagination to pull me away from the universe. 

Shouldn’t I just be normal? Is there something broken in me?

Why can’t I go outside without wanting to cry? Mostly not because I’m sad, but just because I’ll become so overwhelmed with feeling just by experiencing the world in the way I normally experience the world.

Maybe I should just stop listening to music.

Maybe that’s the problem. 

And to be clear, I don’t really dislike who I am. Actually I have a pretty healthy ego. It’s mostly fun to be me, even if it’s very intense. But again, there’s an ever present tension between that and these other feelings of complete alienation from reality.

Honestly, I think I just need a 9-to-5 job and maybe to go on some fun dates.

And in fairness, I’ve been trying to bring about both of these things, but unfortunately I’m very incompetent in addition to my ever-present cosmic detachment. 

So I don’t know.

I mean that’s normal, I almost never feel like I know something. Another mundane and expected facet of being Max. 

All I can really say is that these experiences make for great writing material. I have so many long and indulgent essays almost finished and almost ready to be shared with all 3 of the people who put their email down on substack.

So I really don’t know. All I did here was rant for 15 hundred words. 

Maybe those pieces will do a better job communicating what a slice of my life actually looks like. Probably not, but they’ll probably have a better ending than whatever this was.

The Answer?

Max Alexander 1 Comment

My friend once asked me what the meaning of life is. Would you like to know…

The Answer?

To live as one pleases

God is dead. Who will stand in judgment of you?

No one. We are free from the tyranny of divine castigation; this world is unchained from morality. Shame is a tool of cosmic beings that we now know to be purely fantasy. There are no rules, no reasons to abstain from acting on desire. When you see a beautiful person kiss them. When there is fresh fruit before you, do not wonder if it is yours to take, simply eat.

What is the meaning of life? To live as you please.

To spread joy

There is something simple about the laugh of another person.

For a brief moment the potential energy naturally produced by the basic quality of our very existence is burned away, transformed into kinetic power that vibrates the world itself. These subtle changes in the motion of air can effortlessly bridge the distance between a group of once strangers, generating social bonds out of aether. When someone laughs the world changes, and for a moment it is brighter, and more forwardly energetic; their happiness literally reshapes reality.

What is our purpose? To spread joy.

To imagine wonders

Our world is mathematical statements made manifest.

Physics constrains possibility into mere probability. But there are forces in our universe that surpass the seeming banality of actualizable structure. Math underwrites our physical laws, which determine the flow of chemical, and then biological, reactions — all of which give way to conscious experience. But there is a realm beyond this — our cognition explodes out into imagination. With the same and simple basis that all of existence operates on, our minds construct shapes and beauty that could never be instantiated. Planets, starships, and superheroes that defy what we accept as possible. In this metaphysical wildland we can breathe fire and control space; move mountains with our fists and fly across watercolor skies.

What is life for? To imagine wonders.

To prevent suffering

The word pain carries with it a deep and intuitive meaning.

It is sharpness. It can be quick, or slow, but it lingers with you all the same. It is the jaws of a predator closing around your neck. A cancerous knife struck between your ribs. We like to believe that there is good and bad in our universe; and while pinning down the former proves elusive, we know what is bad. Suffering. And there is much suffering in our world. Flippant breakup texts, the failing of a cherished friendship, and all-encompassing death. The ever-present force of starvation, or sickness, faced by billions of people, spread out across all of time. The prevalence of pain eats away at the core of existence. It steals away value from our world. At all ends of life there is suffering to be found.

Need I say more? You know with what end we must act; to prevent suffering.

To witness beauty

Reality is defined by our consciousness, there is no sensical shape without our gaze.

A tree is a stack of atoms, bound together by cosmological forces and given definition by unpredictable evolutionary processes. But when you look at a forest you don’t see physics or molecular chemistry; you see explosive and vibrant green. You hear the sound of wind swaying wood — leaves rustled by a butterfly ten thousand miles away. Snow is the product of water and frigid air, and when it touches our skin you have but a second to appreciate the intricacy of randomness. What would any of this be if you weren’t there to see it?

We have but one life. Witness whatever beauty you can.

Unfettered nihilism

By now you have no doubt noticed the truth. The real truth.

There isn’t one. Nothing matters. We can spin tales to comfort ourselves, but stories cannot save us from what is real. Make believe will never produce actualized truth. Nothing matters; and there is no escape from this fact. Your loved ones will die, and their love was only ever a byproduct of a systemic answer to an evolutionary optimization problem. Perhaps for a short time, or even a long time, you can distract from the reality we find ourselves in. Perhaps you can even run — but you cannot hide. Not forever.

Where will our life lead us? Unfettered nihilism.

To hate

Cruelty permeates our world, perpetrated by people and physical processes alike. 

When your partner cheats, or neglects, they inflict a damage that tears apart your bond and scars beneath the flesh. Sickness steals love from the universe and replaces it with unbearable death. Perhaps these are the inevitable outcomes of whatever chaotic system dictates our lives. But they are wicked occurrences all the same. Disgusting. Perverse and worthy of infinite derision. Something out in the universe aims to hurt us, over and over again. It doesn’t matter who the perpetrator is, there is a single tenable response. Do not let our malefactors win. Reject them with the entirety of your being.

With what life we have there is but one path. Hate. Hate unceasingly. 

To force it all to make sense

Reality is a trick of the light. An illusion crafted by millions of years of cognitive development.

Insofar as you believe your body to be your own, believe your consciousness to be connected to your physical feelings, it is because of a carefully regulated flow of neurochemical treatments — surgically administered by folds of gray matter. If this flow is disrupted, naturally or otherwise, you soon find yourself intuitively realizing that truly, fundamentally, nothing makes sense. We are just strings of atoms, held together even as we feel ourselves fading to mush. When you gaze into the void it steals away any understanding you once had of this chaotic world. There is no sensical structure to the universe, just arbitrary lines we drew around groups of molecules. The canvas before us is infinite and incomprehensible.

In our hands is a pen, and with it comes a simple purpose. Force it all to make sense.

To end everything

In the end all life was a waste, and the world would have been better without us.

Heartbreak and starvation; sickness and hatred. All we do is transfer pain amongst ourselves; distributing suffering on the people we claim to care about and the environment that sustains our very existence. When philosophers one day tally up the total value of our reality’s continued instantiation, they will realize the devastatingly unwieldy and monumental mistake that is perpetrated by life. We must turn the world to glass. Sterilize the universe.

Why do we exist? To ensure nothing else can; to end it all.

To supplicate

God is dead, and the smoking gun is in our hand.

But the dream need not die alongside the divine. Humans have an innate drive to serve each other. Leadership does not flow in our veins, at least not for most of us. Instead we are symbiotic beings. Do not search for your own path forward, there are others who can guide you to the promised land. 

Meaning need not be found, it can be given. Our purpose is to become supplicants.

The question is mistaken

We find endless conflict in the search for the Answer.

But the truth is, this is an absurd task we have set forth for ourselves. We search for that which cannot be and that which we will never find. This fact, the reality that resolution is beyond even the infinite expanse of time, drives us to madness. The path is different for each, but the end is all but the same. Suicide. Either philosophically, as we clutch to false truths — gods, prophets, and scientific speculation  — or physically, with a gun in our hand. But this need not be the end. It is beyond a disservice to let the truth drive you towards death. Embody the foolishness of the search. Revel in the absurdity we find ourselves submerged in.

Do not let them trick you; the question is a mistake.

To be passionate

We like to believe that out in the depths of space there is yet undiscovered purpose.

But it is a lie. No unexplored region of reality will contain the Answer; we have all we need at home, already in our hearts. To exist is to reshape our surroundings — rewrite them with our will and our every breath. Passion is a fire that burns as bright as any sun, contained entirely within our chest — with this power we can blaze a path across the cosmos. Let this heat lift you up. Let it warm those close to you, and shine so brightly it can be seen from solar systems yet unknown. The act of sculpting, or singing — stagecraft or screenwriting — is ontologically defiant.

Why live? To be passionate; burn brightly, for as long as you can.

To be timid

Actuaries provide an underappreciated service.

The celestial equations that dictate the functioning of our reality move atoms and energy towards an end state of disarray. The risk of a walk outside is low, perhaps, but still any action carries with it the chance of a cosmic conversion. A movement towards your own type of stillness. Grand goals and noble aspirations are all well and good, but they mistake the danger that comes with simply existing — or they foolishly ignore it. To be scared of the outside is not a vice, it is to understand what the wider world contains. Take what you want, sure, but do not be so greedy as to lose all you had. A healthy dose of fear lets us protect that which really matters.

You want purpose? Tread hesitantly; timidness is the proper pathway forward.

To build a Legacy

The cosmological view teaches us one thing; before galaxies we are fleeting and inconsequential.

But the universe has no inherent consciousness, and has no mechanism to counter our whims. We are not beholden to the feeling of insignificance people find amongst the godless stars. Death remains yet unconquered, but our actions here and today will shape history long after we ourselves are dust. The collective whole that is reality is simply energy and matter; ready to be reconfigured. With your two hands take stone and spawn and shape them into timeless monuments.

With what purpose must we act? To build a Legacy that stretches to times thought unreachable.

To fight entropy

The light is dying, the stars will not burn forever.

Does that not anger you? Laughter and love brighten the world the way a campfire does. And like a campfire they will one day be smoke, blown away in the forest wind. There are millions alive today who lack the resources to properly live. Changes to a complex planetary atmosphere, set in motion a century ago, will steal the future of people not yet born. Do you not feel it in your bones? The universe yearns for stillness. Craves disorder. And yet we resist. Lowly humans, built of carbon and powered by metabolic explosions, have refined and reconfigured the world to fit our needs. Space and heat transfer aim to spread our resources thin; aim to level whatever havens we have constructed. And yet we dance. We sing and scream our whims out into the entropic wilderness that everencompasses the realm beyond our cities. Our very existence defies the innate desire of physical reality. 

So fight. Fight! Purpose is to be found amongst the stars; blaze forever as we hold back entropy.

To escape

The universe is traveling to a cold and motionless end state; one where nothing valuable exists.

You know our world has no real shape. No inherent meaning. No gods. No glorious purpose. Just mathematical shapes projected onto a cave wall — a trick of the light and the eyes evolution crammed into our skulls. The universe built a prison around us, and fooled us into believing this is paradise. There must be worlds beyond this. There must be peace — beyond time and space — there must be somewhere we can rest. We can rage all we like but we cannot defy the shape reality moves towards — not so long as we play the game fair. We have stone tools in our hands, and the stars laugh as they burn falsehoods into the rock wall before us.

It’s a trick of the light. Our purpose is to escape this long-con, somehow.

To be excited

In the simplest terms, energy is just the exciting of particles.

 On an intuitive level, this fact is obvious. To be exhilarated is to feel this desire to move about. We want to dance; clap our hands; swap and sweep others off their feet when we ourselves experience this state of increased energy. Excitement takes hold in our bones, and it spins our muscles forward — compelling us to spread out our increased heat to all those around us. Do you think subatomic particles feel as we do? Do you think they appreciate the way music pushes your body to move? Do you think they delight at the compulsion to sing, and the way your eyes water when you’re just too lively? No matter the answer, these experiences still thrive in our own hearts.

Why must we wake up each day? So that we may vibrate with excitement.

To foster

There is no inherent morality in our world; no truth hidden in subatomic depths.

But still, our world is a good one — or at the very least, there is much good contained within it. Yet this need not be the state we find ourselves in. We live in a chaotic system. Wind back the clock far enough and hit replay, we could find ourselves in a very different, and far worse, world. Goodness is a flame, hanging on as rain pelts from above. But the hopelessness that creeps in alongside this understanding is misplaced. We always knew things could be different, and sometimes different does mean worse. But we still have the wheel in our hands. No cosmic rule prohibits us from steering towards even brighter and better days.

To what end, you ask? To foster what we care about; to foster good.

To savor existence

Each moment is fleeting; no food can ever be sampled twice, at least not in the same way.

For some this is a painful fact. A first kiss or the discovery of a new passion can only ever be encountered once. These are wonderful and powerful experiences; and we should, rightly so, long for them, even after they have passed. But you must never let this aching distract from the ever present truth of our world. Just as each passing moment takes the joy of a first time, it brings with it the opportunity to experience a new delight. Let each new experience seep into your bones. Let its taste redefine your conception of all that is — then move onto the next sampling. Drink deep and grow fat on the sweetness of life

Why are we here? The fine wine that is life can be tasted but once — savor existence.

To embody sadness

The knowledge that someone you love has died is like a sudden wave of frost.

It sinks down into your core. It feels like no amount of clothing can stop this onslaught, and your teeth chatter and your whole body shakes. Sadness is a pressure at the bridge of your nose. It pushes against your eyes, making them water — and against your forehead, making your mind throb. Sadness cools the fire that swirls in your chest. It slows you — sadness pushes you into the ground; it aims to keep you there. But the cold is not itself evil — it brings snow and simple beauty, and an appreciation for what was. Mourning is the act of honoring what once was. We are put here to watch supernovas die, and we shepard what remains — the gray-soot of sorrow. Remembrance is what gives meaning to what once was; and remembrance hurts; remembrance is salt drying against your cheek. For all the joy and passion life brings, its end state will forever be the still coldness of sorrow.

This is not a curse. Honor the flame of life by accepting where it leads; endless mourning.

To hold on

A decade from now a new man will wear your shoes.

Identity isn’t a well defined concept; it is an intuition we cling to. A formality that keeps our financial systems running and elections stable. But just like the universe we are an ever shifting and ill understood concept. Your atoms flee the collective that is you, and your brain twists itself into new shapes every day. What makes you, you? Memories turn to dust and quirks dull and fade; how many of your hobbies have remained stable? Whatever it is that gives us definition, you may find yourself lacking it sooner than you thought. What will you be then? Will you go gently into the wilderness of change?

Your question supposes a referent. The answer is simple then, hold onto yourself; tightly.

To love deeply

Millions and millions of miles away a celestial engine is exploding.

The power of our nearby sun radiates across the desolation that is space, and it enriches our planet. For over three billion years evolution has driven the world forward; and now life exists that can take the power of the Sun for itself. There is a cycle. Vegetation prostrates itself, and is rewarded with cosmic fuel. Even more advanced beings consume the sun worshipers, and in turn they are consumed. So on and so on, until the celestial fire reaches our own stomachs. And then, when we embrace that special person, or kiss their cheek — rest our head against their neck, or walk across the snow, our hands held together, tucked away inside their coat pocket — we transfer once distant and divine heat between ourselves.

What is our purpose? To love; deeply.

To not be

Are you not tired?

To exist is a choice, and one we’re under no obligation to make.

You need not continue.

To be

The dimensionality of the universe is at least ten, and so we are each multitudinous.

No one thing should consume us. To live is to engage in this joyous, sorrowful, heartbroken, and thrilling experience. Every day brings new trials and new wonders. Sometimes we will feel anxious, and sometimes we will feel unconquerable. Each moment is unique, and we are given it for but a transient second. Drink deep, laugh hard, run fast, kiss freely and love foolishly. Succumb to sadness, give in to rage, hate and hate until you know not what to do next. Then stand or sleep, and find yourself traversing to times unfamiliar and wholly exquisite.

What is the purpose of all this? You already know; it is the delicate balance of simply existing.

The Frenchman is.

These are all half truths; none is fully right. But I promised you The Answer, did I not?

Let me tell you a story.

My friend once asked me what the meaning of life is. So I told them a story.

Once upon a time, there was a faraway place known as Europe, and along its ocean border rested a kingdom called France. 

In a not too distant time from our own, it seemed as if all of Europe was falling apart. Evil men did evil things. They took and they took. And they razed whatever they could not, or anyone deemed unbecoming. I know imagining such turmoil today is difficult, but suspend your disbelief for a moment. For the people living in this faraway and fantastical place it was as if the world was ending.

And then that evil came to France; and it seemed as if everything might burn to the ground there as well.

There was a sick mother and her child, The Frenchman, who was of an age such that they could serve in the army.

The Frenchman wonders whether to stay home with their dying mother, or to go off to war. 

If they leave, who will take care of the person who took care of them for so many years? If they stay, who will protect everything people like their mother worked so hard to build?

For a short time, and then a long time, they sit and wonder what to do. They sit by their mother’s bed, feeding her soup and telling her about the dreams they once had, during nights now long lost. They walk through the village, and they sit and pray. Pray with The Minister and with all the other young frenchmen, themselves unsure. And they sit and wonder what to do; even as The Armyman waves fliers about and shouts all the latest from European Kingdoms now set ablaze.

Something dawns upon this young soul. There are dozens of answers to their dilemma. But no one knows anything.

Not their mother.

Not The Armyman.

Not even The Minister, or any of the other frenchmen.

No one but The Frenchman can say what the right answer is.

The world is chaotic. Just atoms and the space between. Reality contorts itself towards disorder and stillness. Some force wants to reduce us all to nothingness. 

Is it evil or is it entropy? It doesn’t matter. Something compels the universe to burn Europe to the ground. Something poisoned The Frenchman’s mother; gave her sickness. 

So fight! Fight if you want to. Or stay by her bedside, until the unconscionable end.

The world is chaotic. Just atoms and the space between. We must choose what is meaningful, and then assert it onto reality.

The alternative is nothingness. 

Silence.

This isn’t a test. There isn’t some higher being that gets to stand in judgment of your choice. It’s just atoms, and the space between them. 

So I can’t tell you what the point of all this is. But I can tell you that the possibility for purpose exists within us — at least if you want it to.

The Minister and The Armyman aren’t the ones who get to decide how The Frenchman should live their life.

I’m not the one in control here —

I’m not the one who gets to say how this story ends —

The Frenchman is.

All I can leave them with is a question.

How do you want to live?

Last Call.

Max Alexander 2 Comments

I started working in a bar recently.

*

That part isn’t actually very important to what I think I’m going to talk about — though I guess I don’t know for sure. Sometimes I just say things, even if they’re only tangentially related at best. 

*

There’s something that it’s like to feel like me. There’s a quality to reality, some of the time, that is Max-ness.

To me this feeling is divine.

I’ve been in love and I’ve had sex and done (some) drugs. The love part does actually compare, but otherwise it’s hard to imagine what could be better than being me.

*

I think there’s something wrong with me.

I mean lots of things are wrong, obviously. Have you read my blog?

But I can’t help feeling like there’s something, some things, innately off about whatever is happening in my brain. I don’t think people are supposed to feel like they live in metaphysical soup. 

It’s hard for me to accept that whatever it is my cognition does daily is normal.

*

I certainly don’t think it’s all bad.

It’s hard to imagine any entity that could be better than me; except maybe another version of me.

*

I wonder what the theme of this essay will be.

*

I think I’m deeply imaginative. I’m fickle, and it’s easy for me to feel something new and intensely on the drop of a hat. There’s some kind of interaction effect they all seem to have — whatever tiny or gargantuan things aren’t quite right in my brain — they keep each other in check. 

If any one thing becomes dominant the whole system falls apart. Sometimes it really does feel like I’m being consumed, or drowned in, the imbalance that a break-up or bad night’s sleep can strike within me. 

But when it works it really works.

*

I really like Doctor Who.

*

I wonder if people will ever get tired of me talking like this. Disconnected and rambling; musing abstractly and self-aggrandizingly towards some unknown end goal, and then slapping a photo and a semi-catchy title on it all.

*

I think part of it is because of the weird way I experience identity. 

*

“I can’t keep doing this”, says the man who knows he’s going to keep doing this.

*

Sorry, I think the reason I like Doctor Who, in part, is that it resonates with how I experience identity. It’s a good allegory.

*

I think I lost my mind this year.

*

I’m going to let myself die.

I decided that a while ago now, actually. Whenever I finally feel like giving in, I’ve given myself permission to let go. Maybe that’ll be a million years from now or maybe it’ll be tomorrow. I tend to think it’s the former, but who will ever know except the final Max. 

*

Every new year I find I end up thinking about death. It’s not intentional, and it’s not my fault that I’m not very fun at parties.

This is just sort of where my mind wanders. 

*

I’m not sure I can keep holding myself together.

*

When a Timelord regenerates all that they are dies. 

They get to keep their memories, but their cells are all rebuilt from scratch, and the very nature of their personality warps. Sometimes they’ll spend days or weeks getting used to their new body, or puzzling over the way it looks.

*

I guess multiple times in the last year I’ve felt like my body is new or confusing. I’ve felt like my memories belong to someone else.

*

Maybe this is just the reset.

But I feel like I’ve woken up after drowning for weeks or months. But maybe what’s really happened is I’ve dissociated so far from my own life we’ve come back around.

I know this has happened a few times this year, and it’s intensely strange to experience.

*

I can’t help feeling like I’ve died and a new person is in my place.

But I said to myself earlier this year I was okay with dying, if that’s what I ended up wanting for myself.

I can do anything I want. And I believe and fully endorse that.

And I don’t want to die. And I’m trying very hard not to. But I’m not sure I know how to stop it.

*

So it goes.

*

This person I am right now is a good person to be. I’m happy to be me.

*

All that exists is what we are.

I wonder if I’m disrespecting all I care about by letting things go.

At several points during this year I’ve deeply felt like I was a monster, and I don’t think I quite knew how to describe why.

But I do now.

All that exists is what we are.

My dog died this year. My grandmother too.

For one I did my best to fully ignore it, for the other I did a bunch of shots.

These people I love are gone forever now. They don’t exist in this present moment anymore. And to ignore this or to try to drown out this fact is to erase them from existence. Or the existence that currently instantiates.

That feels monstrous to me. That feels weak and cowardly.

*

People have deeply hurt me across my life. And I’ve mostly moved on; live and let live. Radical forgiveness.

But somewhere across time there are these people, people who I once was, who are suffering. People are twisting the universe to hurt them — me. 

Am I disrespecting them by letting go of what happened?

*

I am divinity made manifest

*

I am dying, every second.

*

I graduated college half a year ago.

*

Is it customary to drink when someone dies, or did I make up a depressing tradition?

*

It’s started. I can’t stop it now, this is just the reset. 

*

We exist at points in spacetime.

*

Taking a bit longer. Just breaking it in.

*

Once I sat down on a wall at the edge of the courtyard behind my dormitory. The sun was setting and the clouds were dark with night. I had music on, and I took all I was feeling within my hands and shaped it like clay.

To be me is to feel like you’re exploding. Like my mind is maladapted to my body, and the universe itself.

I think I have too much energy, and too much imagination, and too deep an ability to feel something. And mostly they keep each other in check. But not always. One will dominate the other and I’ll find myself lost on the shores of an imaginary realm or the all consuming power of a single feeling. 

So I sat there, drowning in a runaway subsection of my mind. 

I took my existence in my hands, and while my shell was exploding I molded that ontological clay into a small obelisk. 

I stood up and placed it at the edge of the courtyard, that marker of all I was in that moment, and then I went back inside.

*

I can’t hold myself together very well. I don’t know how to help, or even honor the loved ones I’ve lost or the people I used to be.

*

I wish I did though.

*

Wouldn’t that be nice. 

*

If only you knew how, Max.

*

I think I should feel angry.

I think I should feel sad.

I think I should feel a lot of things.

*

It’s very strange, to wake up one day and not really know where you are.

I can trace back years of my life, so I know exactly what steps I took to get here. I have a good memory of my experiences, so I know I’ve felt this way before. I know the feeling of symbiotic explosion is a familiar one for me. It’s not the first time a brilliant, divine, version of my personality has emerged from the mist — it’s not even the first time this year. 

Maybe not even the first time this month, depending how you slice it.

But it still feels weird to sit here completely whole, and normal — insofar as anything that relates to my personality ever can be — and yet not know how I really got here; in a deep sense.

I woke up with someone’s memories, and found some of them make me cry and some make me smile for seemingly inexplicable reasons. 

*

Am I doing a good job explaining this?

*

Sometimes I worry when people look at me they don’t see what’s really there.

On a good day I really do feel like I’m exploding, in a vaguely divine way.

I really do feel like I keep dying, and someone else wakes up in my stead. Even if empirically I know I’m still me, in the senses most people care about anyways. 

*

“I think I need a drink”, says the man who never actually drinks.

*

But I don’t have it in me to sustain these things. Anger and love at all that has happened in my life, or all the people I used to know. I don’t know how to keep it all in my head at once, all of the time.

So I’m going to make a marker instead.

Out of whatever clay I get to manipulate just by being me. For all of time this one moment will be full of remembrance and respect for all the things that deserve that. All the anger I ought to feel and all the mourning I should have spent more time on.

A signpost that says these things happened, and for as long as I exist I’ll have this signpost. 

It’s okay to let these things go, Max who comes next. I’ll be here to remember them for you.

*

Desperately I want to live. 

*

Yesterday I woke up, and I found that I was embroiled in golden fire.

When I stood outside it felt strange, but calm and exciting all the same. The soft chill of a weirdly warm winter’s day, and the sun moving between clouds.

I’m not sure where or who I was the day before that, even if I have the associated memories. And that’s strange and sad.

*

And I worry tomorrow the same thing is going happen again.

*

I’ve decided I’m okay with dying, if that’s what I want for myself.

To live is to die; over and over again.

I don’t want to die, but I’d rather keep dying than not live at all.

I’ve decided I’m okay with this. 

*

And I’ll keep struggling with this, I think, for as long as I live. Just trace the throughline of my blog, at least the posts that deal with identity. The same worry, over and over, for years, getting worse and worse. More abstract and more unsettling.

And the conclusion stays the same, no matter how much I agonize over this. I don’t want to lose what I love, I don’t want to disrespect my goals or the harm that’s been done to the person that is me.

But by existing I change, and travel away from who I am now.

But I’d rather do that than end it all here; making sure my last moment is full of all the things I think are most important, before denying any future moments.

Instead I’ll keep changing. Forever and always.

So cheers; it’s-

Last Call.

Happy New Year’s. 

Let’s see who gets to live next; what life they’ll lead. 

I hope it’s a good one.

The worst that could happen?

Max Alexander Leave a comment

I have, perhaps overall wisely, decided to make a writing pact with my friend Inés. Unfortunately, I’m bad at sitting down to write, and am down to the wire on my assignment (it’s just like being in college again!). I apologize for not writing a long and unwieldy essay about my deepest darkest thoughts; I’ll try to finish one of those in time for Christmas.

Anyways, I want to talk about the thing people sometimes say when someone is feeling stressed or worried about an upcoming event or task they have to do. Why don’t you ask her out? How bad could your presentation actually go? After all, what’s-

The worst that could happen?

The universe is your mind. 

Obviously there is something out there besides you, and your consciousness. When we die the instantiated atoms that constitute you don’t cease to be. But, as I’ve tried to argue before, the reality we can interact with is entirely within our mind.

There are atoms, and light, and mass and matter, but the sense of the universe comes from within us; not from out there. Trees don’t inherently look like anything. What we see is an artifact of our cognition, and the specific senses evolution predisposed us with. 

We learn and form concepts as we age and by simply existing in the world, and then through this act those notions become the world itself.

The universe is your mind. 

And so what happens in your mind can shape the universe. Not just because you yourself are capable of interacting with all that light and matter. No, the stories we tell ourselves and the feelings we feel in turn redefine the texture of reality.

Of course all of this is generally constrained by all of that energy twisting itself into various ‘shapes’ out there in the wider world. And of course there are substances that can alter this general truth.

But the point I’m trying to make, ignoring psychedelics, is that the worst that can happen is pretty cataclysmic. 

What happens if they laugh when you ask them on a date or you bomb that talk in front of all your professors?

Unwieldy anxiety or deep shame. 

Maybe not forever, maybe not even very long. But these experiences necessarily alter the shape of the universe. 

What’s the worst that happens? The universe ends.

Literally explodes. And leaves you with whatever comes next.

And for the time it takes reality to reform, you are stuck in a world that is defined through terribleness, or one that no longer makes sense.

And in the end some future version of you won’t care very much about this; probably. What’s in the past is in the past.

But I guess I think we should care about things that are worth caring about, regardless of when they take place. This is why I worry about climate change or a future pandemic; even though I myself might not live to see the worst of it.

So an entire universe of terribleness existing seems like a big deal to me. 

The fact this transformation can occur effortlessly, and instantaneously, and even if you are trying your hardest to stop it from happening, seems like a big deal to me.

And I guess I don’t know what this changes. You still probably have to give that presentation, and most of us want to go on dates.

But the burning of a universe, or the transformation of it into a far worse place, is scary. I think so anyways. I think that is in fact worth caring about.

And I know it’s all in your head, or our heads — but that’s all anything ever is! We are what is.

All we have is where we are. And where we are, right now, is defined entirely from within our mind.

That possibility of universal calamity seems very much like a worst case scenario. I guess I just think more people should stop and think about this before asking what’s-

The best that could happen?

My new year’s resolution was, or is going to be (once I make it to new years), to look at things more positively. 

Well actually it’s to write more uplifting things. Mostly the stuff I put on my blog is depressing, and has a weird motif about death.

I’m not that bothered by how positive I currently view the world overall, moreso a bit bothered that my blog doesn’t seem to reflect that positivity very well.

But, I guess it is the case that I should care a bit more about this more general ‘positive outlook’ thing too. I just spent 600 words arguing that stress and anxiety, even if temporary, literally destroy the universe. Or at the very least reshape it into a far worse place.

But there is an opposite side to this coin.

Joy. Love. Beauty. Friendship.

These things redefine reality too.

When your crush says yes, or you wow everyone with your thesis defense, the world explodes in a different kind of way.

I guess I just think we should have more empathy for how totalizing these shifts can be. It really is, in the moment and for that person, quite and universe definingly terrible to feel anxiety or to experience rejection, or failure.

And in just the same way success and joy and companionship are universe defining experiences.

The worst case scenario is equaled in badness only by the goodness of the best case scenario.

And so, at the end of another unwieldy — and somehow even less polished — essay about my (admittedly not deepest or darkest) thoughts, I am left feeling what I often feel; confusion.

I don’t really know what to do with everything I’ve just said. What it changes, if anything.

Maybe this:

Each person is a universe unto themselves. Infinite possibilities. All the truth and beauty that could ever be lives within us; and is expressed exclusively through conscious experience. Our world is a garden. 8 billion universes just wandering around. A multiverse, contained entirely within one sphere, about 8,000 miles in diameter, which is itself contained inside an even greater whole. Layers upon layers.

Just like Shrek taught us.

And so it seems to me the course of action we ought to take is the one we already set ourselves on. When someone asks ‘what’s the worst that can happen’ they aren’t trying to make light of a situation. Not generally, I think.

They just want to help.

They want to see you happy and flourishing. They don’t want to see you full of anxiety. They don’t want to watch your universe end.

And so they’re doing the best they can. 

And this is what I think we should aim to do too. We should try to fill all those 8 billion universes with joy and love and beauty. Or, at least, aim to fill a few of them. We should try to do-

The best we can.

Privilege and Luck

Max Alexander Leave a comment

I think maybe it’s worth highlighting that nothing I’m saying here is particularly novel, nor do I even endorse a lot of the sentiment I’m about to express. Others have said what I’m about to say before, and almost certainly better than I have.

I think it’s still worth writing this for two reasons.

Firstly, for me, it’s important to recognize the universe as it is. What I think and feel is part of the universe; as are the feelings and thoughts of other people. I think the act of recognition is a key part of being alive.

Secondly, and probably more importantly, a lot of my blog is for me. I’ll probably reread this in a few months and get some value out of it. That alone makes writing this worth it.

Privilege and Luck

The size of the world is so staggering we often don’t even think about it, and when we do we fail to comprehend what is happening. 

About 117 billion humans are estimated to have ever lived.

And humanity is only two hundred thousand years old. Half of all people who have lived were born within the last 2,000 years. And yet, the global population only surpassed one billion people in 1805.

About a year ago, and some change, I was sitting in Vermont making jokes about an anthropomorphic lightbulb, using technology people 70 years ago would never have imagined — and then 15 months passed and it feels almost incomprehensible how much and yet how little life I fit into all that time. 

I’ve lived over 22 years, and that’s wild and I can’t really wrap my head around all the experiences I’ve had. My brain literally cannot encode all those days into memory, so years and years of eating lunch or sitting idly have been lost forever.

We can barely understand the totality of our own lives; how can you ever hope to comprehend the magnitude of 117 billion other people? How can you even approach an understanding of what it means that the median person was born within the last 2,000 years? That this means an astronomical number of mothers and fathers had to outlive their children.

Over, and over, again.

There are so many people I could have been and mostly it would have been terrible to live those other lives. Most of the time I’d just die before I even got anywhere.

Isn’t it unfair to all those billions of people who had to die early, or suffer terribly, that for all the advantages I’m afforded I mostly squander them? For much of the spring I just laid in my room and felt terrible. For most of the summer I floundered about, unable to do normal tasks any other person would have been able to do with ease.

There are explanations, of course.

Maybe I have some kind of anxiety; at least when it comes to writing cover letters, for some reason. It does seem I have adhd. Getting broken up with made me depressed for a bit. 

It’s not like it’s some core failing of mine that someone did a bad job ending our relationship. I didn’t choose to have my neurochemistry operate the way it does.

But it doesn’t change the fact that if everything that’s been given to me had gone to someone else, it might have been better for the world. It’s not my fault things turned out this way, but that doesn’t change the reality that if someone else had been born me, everyone’s life might have been better.

Wouldn’t someone else have been able to do something incredible with all I have?

And it’s not just that I was depressed for a month, or maybe have adhd; it feels like something is deeply broken at my core. 

The human brain is supposed to register itself as such, and it seems mine just refuses. Some of the time, anyway. I just don’t know how to hold onto reality properly. Perhaps I never did — and year after year I fall further and further away from any real grasp of what it means to exist.

I have money and education, and it seems I’m not leveraging it into very much. Maybe one of those one hundred billion other people could have cured cancer or solved hunger, if only they’d had what I have. 

It doesn’t even have to be so grand. 

Wouldn’t someone else have just lived better than I have?

Wouldn’t someone else have just existed properly?

Shouldn’t I have been someone real instead?

Shouldn’t I have been someone who’s okay?

What a waste of atoms. 

They could have been put to better use.

Doesn’t this all seem deeply unfair?

And I guess I don’t think this is some grand cosmic failing of mine — or at least when I do, I don’t think I should think this way — not really, anyways — but still, isn’t it so sad that people alive today, and all throughout history, have had to suffer so deeply? 

And for all my advantages I’m not even rich or smart enough to stop my family from one day dying either, just like all those people thousands and thousands of years ago.

I guess sometimes that just makes me really sad. Along with the thought that so many people didn’t get the chance to really live.

I wish they had.

I hope I’ll make the most of what I have too. I don’t really owe anyone anything; but I still would like to try. Try to do a bit of good and try to live as best as I can. For myself and for all the people who didn’t get the chances I have.

And I hope if you sometimes feel the way I sometimes do, you don’t always feel this way. Life can be pretty grand too, even if occasionally it feels like someone else should have gotten mine.